


Constancy

by jayeinacross



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-20
Updated: 2013-07-20
Packaged: 2017-12-20 20:42:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/891637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jayeinacross/pseuds/jayeinacross
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somehow, at a time that Hermann can't pinpoint exactly and much to her frustration, Newton becomes a constant.</p><p>[Always-a-girl!Hermann, pre-movie, slight AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Constancy

**Author's Note:**

> for this [prompt on the kinkmeme](http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/350.html?thread=161630#t161630):  
>    
> Always-a-girl Hermann suffers the short end of the stick at her job. Not only does she have to work alongside an obnoxious kaiju fanboy for 22 hours of the day, but she also has to tolerate the unwanted attention that being the only female in the establishment unable to kick ass generates. She's unable to move from room to room on a daily basis without being catcalled, propositioned, or having crude remarks thrown her way.  
> Newton might be annoying, obnoxious, sarcastic, and an idiot, but at least he's always seen her as a scientist first and foremost. Any snarky remarks he sends her way are related to her work or theories rather than her sex.  
> As a result, she finds herself starting to appreciate him a little more, and actually looks forward to sitting next to him at the lab, observing him elbow-deep in Kaiju guts and gently teasing him for it.  
> He becomes a crutch for her in ways he isn't even aware of.

Newton Geiszler is the most irritating, frustrating, and confusing person that Hermann Gottlieb has ever met, and she realizes this approximately thirty seconds into their first conversation, when he walks into her lab without knocking and dumps a stack of files on her desk.

"You must be Dr. Gottlieb," Newton says, grabbing her hand and shaking it enthusiastically. "You helped program the very first Jaeger OS, right? I'm Newton Geiszler."

She's heard his name before -- he joined the research division of the PPDC a few months ago, but it's a large department, and their paths had never really crossed before, so this is the first time they've actually met.. "And I'm told you're one of the Kaiju researchers," Hermann replies, withdrawing her hand, and she does a double-take when she sees the ink on his arm. "Is that--?"

"Yep, that's Trespasser," Newton says proudly, tugging up his sleeve so he can show her in more detail. Hermann is mildly horrified. "The very first Kaiju to attack. They're really fascinating, you know, but their bodies degenerate so fast once they're dead, and I'm trying to figure out how to preserve them well enough so that I can properly study them--" He's gesticulating so enthusiastically that he knocks a couple of files off the stack he's just put down, but he keeps talking while he crouches down to pick them up again. "I think I'm going to get Scissure done next, maybe on my back, that was a big one--"

"Is this the data I requested?" Hermann interrupts, because she's afraid the guy won't ever shut up unless she stops him right away.

"Sure is." Newton straightens up and Hermann suppresses a wince when he slaps the files haphazardly onto the top of the pile got. "My own research, should help you out."

The fact that everyone talks about what a genius he is doesn't really reassure Hermann that much, now that she's actually met Newton.

"What are you working on?"

Hermann doesn't really want to explain her research to this guy right now; mostly she just wants him to stop bothering her and get out of her lab before he destroys hours of painstaking organization, but he's already wandering over to her blackboards and peering at her equations.

"Don't touch any of that, please," Hermann says, moving around her desk and hurrying towards him, and he doesn't touch, but when she sighs loudly and pointedly, he still doesn't leave. "We have a basic way of detecting activity from the Breach to tell when a Kaiju is coming through, but I'm trying to determine a pattern that will allow us to predict the frequency of an attack."

"Nice." Hermann would be pleased that he sounds so impressed, but she's far too annoyed for that, and only becomes more so with what he says next. "But hey, numbers can only get you so far. See you around!"

Hermann thinks that the sound of his voice has given her a headache.

She sees Newton around the Shatterdome a few times after that, but they don't speak again, much to her relief. Newton does try to wave once, but she's too busy trying to glare down one of the men heckling her to really notice it. There aren't many women at the Shatterdome in the first place, but most of them are Rangers or trainees who wouldn't hesitate to knock any overbearing men down a peg. The Rangers always get more respect anyway, unlike the scientists. Hermann's the only female scientist at the Alaska Shatterdome which doesn't help matters at all, but the harassment isn't serious enough to report without risking things getting even worse, so she just does her best to ignore them and focuses on her work. It's easy for her to lose herself in work, fine-tuning her calculations and making good progress in her research, and she's content enough with that, until a third of the research department blows up.

Thankfully, there are few casualties and no fatalities, but a good portion of the Kaiju Science division has lost their workspace in an experiment gone wrong, and suddenly things in the Shatterdome get shuffled around a bit in order to fit everyone in -- which is fine, but then Newton Geiszler shows up at Hermann's lab, accompanied by Stacker Pentecost himself.

"No," Hermann says. "Absolutely not."

"Yes," Pentecost tells her.

"There are dozens of other scientists with space to share. And dozens others who need space, and I am quite happy to provide them with that. Just not him."

Newton looks a little offended. "Excuse me, Hermann--"

"Don't call me that," Hermann snaps.

"Everybody else has been allocated shared labs already," Pentecost says. "And it will benefit both of you to work together."

Personally, Hermann does not agree, but Stacker Pentecost isn't the kind of person who takes no for an answer, so she resigns herself to being stuck with a borderline manic Kaiju enthusiast until the labs get repaired, and lord knows how long that's going to take. She's not looking forward to this, and from the look on Newton's face, neither is he.

She marks a line down the middle of her lab with tape and moves her things to one side and points to the other. "That is your side. This is mine. Your things do not touch my side."

Newton gives her an incredulous look, but he complies with an eye roll. "Sure, whatever you say."

Hermann files her first complaint against Newton three days after he's moved into her lab. The squelching sounds from his side of the room are bad enough when he's rummaging around in Kaiju intestines, but the music he insists on playing loudly whenever he's dissecting body parts is near unbearable.

_[Submitted by: Dr. Hermann Gottlieb._  
 _Directed at: Dr. Newton Geiszler._  
 _Complaint details: Dr. Geiszler insists on playing his music inappropriately loudly in our temporary shared workspace. It is disruptive and impairs the effectiveness and efficiency of my work...]_

"It gets me in the zone," Newton says, making a face at what he says is her utter lack of taste in good music, and it's probably the most ridiculous thing she's ever heard anyone say.

Most of the things that come out of Newton's mouth are quite ridiculous, in Hermann's opinion.

"The Kaiju might be horrible in a lot of ways, but don't you still want to understand them?" Newton's sitting on one of the cleaner desks and swinging his legs, which is one of things Hermann loathes about him. "They're like nothing we've ever seen before, Hermann, and if we're going to stop them, we've got to understand them too. You can't just solve everything with numbers."

Hermann disagrees. "Numbers don't lie. Numbers have gotten us this far, and they'll get us further – numbers are a constant."

Numbers might seem messy and complicated to some people, but not to Hermann. They're really the only things that make sense. There's always a pattern, always something to dig out that'll make it all come together, you just have to look hard and long enough for it.

This is what Hermann has always wanted to do, even if she didn't exactly anticipate giant monsters rising from the sea as the context for her job when she was eight years old and already three grades ahead. Her parents are both scientists, and her father works on the Jaeger Program as well. She loves her job, but she can't stand Newton Geiszler, but at least this is only temporary.

The other downside is that simply being a woman gains her less respect than if she was a man. She's always known that this would be difficult, and she has expected the harassment, but that knowledge doesn't make the situation any better.

"Hey, if you need physical therapy, I could always help with that," one of the Rangers-in-training leers at her when she passes him in a corridor, and she'd hit him with her cane if she thought he'd let her get away with it. As it is, she knows that some of them have tempers that she doesn't want to deal with, and all she can do is keep walking, and Hermann enters the lab with a scowl on her face and even less tolerance for Newton than usual.

"Get your intestines off my side of the lab," she snaps, pushing the slimy tubes back across the line.

Newton looks like he's about to snap back, but then he sees the look on her face, and all he does is make a face and turn back to the Kaiju limb he's slicing apart. Hermann can see the ink of another tattoo peeking out from his shirt collar, and she rolls her eyes and gets back to her own work, chalk clicking familiarly against her blackboards.

_[Submitted by: Dr. Hermann Gottlieb._  
 _Directed at: Dr. Newton Geiszler._  
 _Complaint details: Dr. Geiszler's Kaiju tattoos are aesthetically displeasing, and could possibly be considered offensive...]_

There are bad days, and then there are truly awful days. This is the latter. Hermann's joints are aching more than usual; she spent too much time bent uncomfortably over notes the day before, and now one of the construction team won't leave her alone at all, and is trying to follow her into her lab.

"That doesn't even make sense!" Hermann shouts, when he tries to make a lewd implication about her and her cane. She goes to her desk, but the guy still lingers in the doorway. "Go away."

As usual, Newton is at one of the workbenches examining Kaiju remains, and he casually throws a lump of slimy flesh over his shoulder. It's a fairly common occurrence, because Newton's learned that it really bothers Hermann when he does that, but this time, even though he doesn't even glance behind him, he manages to launch it as far as the doorway, hitting the construction worker square in the face. The worker makes a horrified and alarmed noise and bolts.

"Good thing I figured out how to neutralize the toxins in this one," Newton says lightly, and that actually startles a laugh out of Hermann.

Hermann still gripes about the slime on the floor later, and Newton retaliates by deliberately nudging some of his equipment even further over the line and stealing half her chalk. Neither of them say anything more about what happened, but Hermann decides not to send HR another complaint about Newton that day, even if he still can't sing at all and should really just stop altogether. Anyway, they still haven't responded to the lasts few she's sent in, which is actually something she's been meaning to ask them about.

_[Submitted by: Dr. Hermann Gottlieb._  
 _Directed at: Human Resources_  
 _Complaint details: No action has been taken concerning my last four complaints, and I suspect that they are being misplaced or ignored, and this...]_

Somehow, at a time that Hermann can't pinpoint exactly and much to her frustration, Newton becomes a constant.

Hermann knows logically that he is not -- human nature may be repetitive and predictable, in the way that Hermann knows that people don't stay around, that people don't stay the same. But the labs seem to be taking forever to repair, probably because most efforts are focused on repairing the Jaegers after a fight so that they're prepared in the event of another sudden attack, and it's an inconvenience for the Kaiju Science division, but not a priority. So Newton becomes a fixture in Hermann's lab -- an irritating, too-excitable and too-loud fixture, but one that she's grown accustomed to nonetheless.

He's still obnoxious and sarcastic and he drives Hermann up the wall, but he never once says anything about her being a woman, so she supposes he can stay. Just until the other labs are repaired.

Sometimes she still can't stand him, and the complaints, while less frequent, are still being filed every now and again, because the Kaiju entrails all over the floor can't actually be conducive to anything at all, despite what Newton insists. But sometimes she doesn't mind it so much, coming in to the lab every day and knowing that Newton will be there ten minutes after her, probably hauling in another specimen and fussing over making sure it's not damaged on the way in. Consistency is a comfort, even when it's Newt and the strange chaos he brings with him.

_[To: Dr. Hermann Gottlieb_  
 _From: Marshal Stacker Pentecost_  
 _Memo: HR has complained that you file too many complaints. Stop.]_

Newton doesn't stop laughing for five straight minutes when he sees that memo on Hermann's desk, so once he finally calms down and is just chuckling to himself, Hermann takes the opportunity to throw a broken piece of chalk at the back of his head, with surprisingly good aim. It leaves a dusting of white powder in his dark hair.

"Hey!" Newton says, and sneezes violently. "Not cool."

There's a priority-one emergency at the Shatterdome one day, when a Kaiju almost takes down a Jaeger, the pilots barely able to kill it before it sinks them. It's the biggest Kaiju that's come through the Breach yet, the strongest they've ever fought, and to top it all off, some kind of malfunction has caused a system overload that has the two pilots unable to disengage from the drift. Hermann's rushed to the launch pad in the Shatterdome, where the pilots have managed to bring the Jaeger back, but still can't disconnect the neural handshake, and their vitals are dropping rapidly. Hermann knows the code well, and she and the other technicians finally manage to free the pilots, but she's shaking afterwards. The first Jaeger was built in only fourteen months; she's worked under pressure before, but never this kind of immediate, potentially fatal kind of situation. The pilots aren't unscathed by any means, and the Jaeger system will need some serious reconfiguration, but they will live.

Hermann heads back up to her lab, exhausted, and Newton's still there, excitedly digging into some fresh specimens that have just been collected. His eyes are still fixed on the Kaiju parts when Hermann walks in, but he hears her enter and immediately starts babbling. "Hermann, you have to come look at this, I think I've found something new. This Kaiju, its toxicity levels are much higher than the other ones we've seen so far. I think they might be advancing, I'll have to run some more tests, I don't know whether we have enough samples to determine whether this has been a gradual change or if it's just started with this Kaiju, but--"

"Not now, Newton," Hermann says, and she barely even manages to sound irritated with him, just tired.

"Hey," Newton says, and for once, he doesn't sound sarcastic or biting or annoyingly enthusiastic. He walks over to where Hermann's sitting down at her desk, staring blankly at the numbers on the pages in front of her. She should start working on how to isolate the Jaeger malfunction and prevent it from happening again, but it's difficult to steady her thoughts right now. "Hey. You and the others fixed it. I heard the announcement. You did it."

"I did it," she murmurs. Newton nudges her and slings an arm around her shoulder, and she lets him -- then she yelps loudly, because there's suddenly a tentacle dangling in front of her face. "Newton! Get that thing out of--you're going to get slime everywhere!"

Newton's laughing as he darts out of reach so Hermann can't hit him, but at least he takes the tentacle with him. Hermann huffs and turns back to her work -- slime-free, by some miracle -- but at least Newton's usual obnoxiousness has snapped her out of her daze, and she finds herself able to focus again. At least, until Newton starts whooping randomly, ignoring the way that Hermann glares at him over the top of her glasses at the interruption. He just blabbers half-incoherently at her and dashes off to relay his research to someone, and five days later, he's packing his equipment away.

"Looks like you've managed to succeed in getting rid of me," Newton tells her, putting all the files that have spent the last few months scattered all over his half of the lab into boxes.

"Thank goodness. I can have my lab back. It'll finally be clean again." Hermann turns back to her computer, tapping rapidly at the keys.

Newton's being sent to Lima. They have a larger, more well preserved collection of Kaiju specimens there, and when some higher-ups had seen his new research, they agreed he'd be better off doing his work there. He probably will be.

"I'm sure you'll enjoy it," Hermann says. "You'll be able to spend even more time wading around in Kaiju corpses, and you'll be bothering someone else instead of me with it."

"I'm totally torn up about leaving you though," Newton says. "Who's going to be here to remind you that numbers don't fix everything?"

Hermann snorts. "Well, they certainly didn't fix you."

Newton bumps his shoulder into hers, which he knows she absolutely hates, and says, "See you around, Hermann."

"Don't call me that," she shouts after him.

Hermann spends the rest of the day cleaning up the lab and reorganizing the place, getting it back to the way she likes it. She peels the line of tape off the ground and moves her things back to where they used to be before Newton moved in. It's much less crowded now, not nearly as cluttered without all of Newton's equipment and specimens taking up so much space, and if the quiet feels unusual, Hermann doesn't have anyone to say anything about it to.

 

* * *

 

She doesn't see Newton around. Over the years, they both jump from Shatterdome to Shatterdome, but their paths never cross, although Hermann does hear his name now and again. He's done a lot of research that's been vital for the classification of the Kaiju, and even Hermann will admit that it's good work, but she still stands by her opinion that the Milking Machine is a terrible name for any kind of invention that's not even remotely relevant to cattle.

The Kaiju Science division barely even exists anymore the next time Hermann sees Newton. The Jaeger Program itself is all but shut down, leaving the Hong Kong Shatterdome the only one that's still active. If Hermann's father had his way, she'd be working on the Kaiju Wall with him, even though she knows it's bound to fail, but he won't listen to her. As difficult as it is to be shut out of her father's life, she's spent too long working on Jaegers, studying the Breach, and listening to Newton blather on about Kaiju to be able to pretend that the 'Wall of Life' will be anything but a failure.

Hermann looks around the last Shatterdome and wonders if the resources and workers that Stacker Pentecost has managed to scrape together will be enough, but then, she supposes that they'll have to.

"It's been a while, huh, Hermann?" Someone says from behind her, and that's a voice she hasn't heard in a long time.

"It's been eight years," Hermann replies. "Didn't I ever tell you that specificity is key?"

"Way too many times," Newton mutters, and Hermann knows that when he bumps his shoulder into hers as they walk towards the lab, it's on purpose.


End file.
